The Illuminator (33 page)

“Alfred? I hardly ever saw him. Though I'm sure I would have liked him.” She added this last apologetically. It was touching how anxious she was not to offend. “It's just that he was always so busy, or with the overseer.”

A reassuring answer. It was hard not to like the girl, regardless of the circumstances of her birth. She had her father's charm.

“Well, I rarely see either of my sons. I miss them both. Alfred has gone as page to Sir Guy, and Colin … well, I don't see much of him either, I'm afraid. He spends a lot of time in the chapel since the shepherd's death. He talks in riddles, about forgiveness and atonement, as though he carries some guilt that somehow he was to blame. But he won't talk about it. At least not to me. Has he spoken of it to you?”

Rose averted her eyes, raised a trembling hand to her throat. The corners of her mouth worked. “He doesn't have time for anything anymore, not even the music. Not since the fire.”

“He'll work it out. He must have been closer to John than I knew. I guess a mother can't know everything about her sons. What about you, Rose? Are you feeling well? Your father has been very worried ever since the night you were so sick. The night I brought you the seed tea. Remember?”

Rose blinked and nodded. “You were very kind to me. Yes, I think I'm better. Though I still get dizzy sometimes. A kind of weakness comes over me, but most of the time I feel well enough.” A light little laugh crinkled the corners of her mouth.

Someday, she'd have laugh lines there, like her father, Kathryn thought. “For weeks I couldn't eat anything, and now I'm making up for lost time. Last night, in the middle of the night, I woke up and I suddenly had the strongest urge for pickled herring. I don't even like pickled herring. It puckers my mouth.”

Suddenly, Kathryn's own mouth felt dry as ashes. And it had nothing to do
with pickled herring. The girl had cravings. Was she so innocent that she couldn't know what that meant? But of course, what female company, what female counsel had she had to grease her way into womanhood? Kathryn knew what that was like. When her woman's flow—flowers, some called it—had first come upon her, she had seen the wine-dark blood and thought that she was dying. Had thought so for months until she'd gone to her father and told him. He'd grown red-faced and summoned the midwife, who had explained the mystery to her in terms that did not make her welcome her passage into womanhood.

How much had Finn told his daughter? He was gentler than her father had been, but might he not, like her own father, have avoided that counsel usually given by a mother or female relative? After all, he had been willing to ignore the implications of his Jewish marriage for Kathryn and her sons.

“Let us talk frankly, Rose. Woman to woman.” She might have said mother to daughter once, but could not bring herself to say it now. “Have your moon cycles been regular?”

Rose looked at her uncertainly.

“Your monthly bleeding, child. Does it come every month?”

Outside, the sun went behind a cloud. The light in the room dimmed, tinting everything gray, except Rose's blush.

“It has been three months,” she said. “But there were other times when it did not come. When I was younger. I thought it might be because I was sick.”

Silence lay between them for as much as a minute. The sun did not reappear and the room grew cold in spite of the peat fire sputtering on the hearth. Kathryn's temple began to throb. This was not a conversation she wanted to have. This should have been Rebekka's duty. Not hers. Did Jewish mothers handle such situations differently? What advise would the dead Rebekka have given her daughter?

“Rose, it may be tied to your illness, all right, but not in the way you think. It may be the cause and not the result.”

“I don't understand.” Almost the whining voice of a child, the child the girl had been a too-short time ago.

“You maybe … ”

How else to say it? “You may be carrying a child. The bleeding stops when a woman becomes with child.”

The girl looked ready to swoon. She dragged a trembling hand across her face. Kathryn stood up and walked over to her, bent over slightly, touched
the girl's chin and tilted it up so that she had to look at Kathryn directly.

“Rose, have you been with a man?” Each word soft, but clearly and slowly enunciated.

The girl said nothing, just chewed on her upper lip, her chin trembling. “Answer me, child. Have you been with a man?”

Kathryn tried to keep her voice low, so as not to frighten the girl, but it was hard. After all, Alfred might be off the hook, but this was Rose.

“Only Colin.”

“I don't mean like that. I mean have you had intercourse with a man? Some knave who may have seen you walking in the garden and taken advantage of you? Even forced you to let him have carnal knowledge of you?”

Rose started to cry, large tears falling in a fountain over the rims of her eyes, running in little streams, seeking their own grooves, pooling in the corners of her quivering mouth.

“Only Colin, my lady.”

Colin?

“Rose, do you know what carnal knowledge means?” Kathryn said in exasperation.

Rose nodded, her hands covering her face.

“Does kissing count? We only kissed. Most of the time.” She paused. Her trembling fingers began to worry the pretty little cross she wore around her neck. “In the wool house.”

The wool house! Kathryn felt the muscles around her heart tighten.

Ask that son of yours about the wool house.

Rose stood up, her skirts knocking the stool over with a clatter, overturning a bucket of steeping hawthorne bark. Both Kathryn and Rose ignored the inky stain creeping across the floor, soaking into the wooden boards. Rose paced, the back of her hand pressed tightly against her throat. She began to sob. Kathryn had to calm her down or she would make herself sick. She put her arms around her and led her gently over to sit on the bed.

“Rose,” she said evenly, as calmly as she could, “kissing doesn't count. Now, is that all you did? Did you and my son do anything besides kiss in the wool house?”

Kathryn could hardly understand her. The word was carried on a little sob that escaped around her hand.

“Twice.”

“Twice? Did Alfred have carnal knowledge of you twice, Rose?”

She started to cry even louder, nodding her head. “We only … twice. But it wasn't Alfred.” More sobs, ragged breaths. Rose sniffled into the ribboned cuffs.

“It was Colin.” Her son's name sailed out on a hiccup. Kathryn could not have been more surprised if Rose had named the pope. She struggled for breath. Beside her, the hysterical girl rocked back and forth, moaning, “Don't… tell … Father … please,” each word jerked out of her by ragged breaths. Kathryn wrapped her arms around the girl.

“Hush, you'll make yourself sick, and that won't help any of us,” she whispered as she rocked the girl back and forth, all the while thinking
Colin.
Why had she not seen? But she had. She'd thought them only children at play. “We won't tell anybody, just yet,” she said. “Mayhap we are wrong. It's possible, even though you've … it's possible you're not with child. We'll wait and see. If you are, well then, there are certain things … For the time being let's just try to stay calm.”

Kathryn's reassurance had a soothing effect on Rose. Her emotional storm subsided into intermittent whimpers and ragged hiccups, but Kathryn's mind whirled with the implications of the predicament. She knew her reassuring words were as empty as hell's cisterns. She knew, too, there was no time to lose. She would go to the midwife right away. There were special concoctions … but first she must speak to Colin. Colin!

She'd promised Rose she would not tell Finn. Better that way. Less complicated. He would be in a rage to learn that her son had deflowered his daughter. Would probably insist that the marriage banns be published immediately. After all, he'd given up everything for the sake of a Jewess; would he not expect her son to do the same? But a son of Blackingham would not marry with a Jew. Not as long as she drew breath.

She pushed the disheveled girl away, held her at arm's length.

“Dry your eyes, Rose. Go to your room and rest. Unbind the curtain lest your father come in and see his pretty daughter in such a state.”

It would never do for Finn to see his daughter so upset. He would worm the truth out of her as easily as a fat friar breaks wind.

“I'll send you up a soothing cup. Try not to worry. We'll think of something.”

Foreasmuch as the Bible contains Christ, that is all that is necessary for salvation; it is necessary for all men, not for priests alone.

—J
OHN
W
YCLIFFE

F
inn approached Norwich from the north. From his vantage above the city, the market unfurled like a corded ribbon streaming from Norwich Castle, massive, hulking, ugly, no longer a military fortress but a prison where souls languished in dungeons. In spite of its creamy veneer of Caen stone glowing golden in the sun, it cast a menacing shadow, looming over the colorful market stalls like a buzzard hunched on a hill. Finn shivered and drew his woolen cloak tighter.

The lower end of the castle bridge led to an outer courtyard where the livestock market was held. A knot of onlookers had gathered there, beneath a scaffold. Finn knew what the attraction was. Such events were always timed for market days, when they could be sure to draw a crowd. Even from this distance—he would venture no closer; he had no stomach for such things— he heard raucous laughter. If he'd only been a few minutes earlier, he could have missed the spectacle altogether. But now it could not be avoided. He'd already seen the rope being placed around the doomed man's neck, and now
Finn, try as he might, could not avert his eyes. The faceless crowd moaned with one voice, a moan that rose to a keening crescendo. The trapdoor opened. Finn held his own breath as the crowd exhaled in one great collective sigh of near ecstasy. He felt the muscles in his own torso twitch as the body arced, then jerked intermittently before coming to swing at the end of the rope like a side of meat. Thank the Holy Virgin he was not close enough to see the bulging eyes, the purple lips protruding from the swollen face. He pulled his horse's bridle to the right and turned his own head away, too late to avoid the rising nausea.

Poor sod, he thought, as he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and urged his horse forward. Probably some rebellious peasant who'd spoken too loudly and too articulately against John of Gaunt's new poll tax, the second in three years. Strong price to pay for speaking naught but the truth. His severed head, eyes pecked out by birds, would soon adorn a pole at a city gate, a warning to others. Truth-telling was a hazardous business.

With the castle behind him, Finn's gaze now rested on the city's other architectural wonder, east of the market. Norwich Cathedral, like Castle Prison, glowed mellow in the afternoon light, and to Finn it was only slightly less menacing. However, he had to admit it was a more pleasing structure to the eye. Its Norman square crossing tower was imposing, though spireless. A hurricane had smashed the wooden steeple to toothpicks in 1362, destroying a portion of the apse in the process. Finn smiled, remembering Wycliffe's calling the hurricane “God's wrathful breath.”

The cathedral's apse had been rebuilt by Bishop Despenser's predecessor, but other priorities superseded the building of the spire. The cloisters needed rebuilding, too, and a wall to protect the Benedictine monks from rioting villagers. The monks had been burned out earlier, in 1297, by a mob of villagers angry at the Benedictines, whose priests sometimes withheld services, even the Eucharist, pending an offering.
They sold the body of our Lord for a penny so they could purchase permits to keep their concubines,
Wycliffe had told him. Not much had changed in the almost hundred years since, Wycliffe had said. Finn had agreed with him there.

Rebuilding the cloisters was an ongoing process. As Finn's horse picked its way along Castle Street and up toward Elm Hill, he saw stonemasons laboring there, heard the slapping of plaster and the scraping of stone as they dressed the sturdy Norwich flint with the more pleasing imported stone from
Normandy. Their curses—against the plaster hardening too soon in the frigid air, against their own blue fingers numb inside their open-fingered gloves—mingled with cries of birds flushed from their nests inside the stone ribs of the cloisters.

When he reached Elm Hill, Finn dismounted in front of the Beggar's Daughter, with its sign promising a frothy tankard—God's Blood, how he could use a frothy tankard. He flicked the reins of his horse to a beggar boy he'd seen before.

“A ha-penny and a pork pie if my beast is here when I come back.”

The ragged urchin scooted forward, grabbed the horse by the bit and led him to shelter in the narrow space between the buildings.